Megyn Kelly Apologizes For Asking “What Is Racist” About Blackface

You can take the woman out of Fox News . . . but you can’t take Fox News out of the woman? This reminder came courtesy of Megyn Kelly on her eponymous NBC show on Tuesday morning, as the host (and recipient of a reported $69 million contract with the network) wondered what the big deal was about white people dressing in blackface for Halloween.

“What is racist?” Kelly asked, during a panel discussion on her show about University of Kent in England’s student union proposal to avoid offensive Halloween costumes including ISIS soldiers, Native Americans, Mexicans, and priests. “You truly do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface at Halloween or a black person who puts on whiteface for Halloween . . . back when I was a kid, that was okay, as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character.”

Kelly proceeded to invoke The Real Housewives of New York City’s Luann de Lesseps’s decision to darken her skin for a Diana Ross costume, aired earlier this year: “People said that that was racist, and I felt like, Who doesn’t love Diana Ross? She wanted to look like Diana Ross for one day. I don’t know how that got ‘racist’ on Halloween.” (De Lesseps, for her part, later apologized for her ill-conceived costume, reiterating that in retrospect, she was “horrified.”)

The other guests on Kelly’s panel—NBC News correspondents Jacob Soboroff and Jenna Bush Hager, plus comedian and reality star Melissa Rivers, stepped in. “If you think it’s offensive, it probably is,” said Rivers, in what is generally a good rule of thumb. “Normal people kinda know where that line is.” Added Soboroff, who was echoed by Bush Hager: “It sounds a little racist to me.” What they didn’t say, and what Twitter swiftly informed Kelly, was that one reason that blackface is racist is because it is, um, rooted in racism—the days of 19th-century minstrel shows in which white actors would wear black makeup to mock and shame African-Americans. (A depressing yet vital bit of history that Kelly should probably be aware of when she’s beaming into millions of homes every day.)

And while Kelly draws a false equivalence between “a white person who puts on blackface at Halloween or a black person who puts on whiteface for Halloween,” in fact, the shameful history of white people donning blackface in an effort to dehumanize black people is part of why the practice is still so charged today. That, and the countless racial inequalities that remain, which Kelly, suffering from a bad case of white privilege, conveniently glosses over, instead deciding to invoke PC culture: “I can’t keep up with the number of people that we’re offending,” she complains, “just by being normal people.”

But as Rivers so wisely suggested, most normal people know better—or at least they should. Lest there be any doubt, the Internet has provided a handy graph on this matter that often surfaces in the run-up to Halloween.

UPDATE: In a memo sent to her colleagues at NBC on Tuesday afternoon, Kelly apologized for her comments, as well as for suggesting that blackface “seemed okay if done as part of this holiday where people have the chance to make themselves look like others,” writing that she realized now “that such behavior is indeed wrong, and I am sorry. The history of blackface in our culture is abhorrent; the wounds too deep.” Kelly wrote: “One of the wonderful things about my job is that I get the chance to express and hear a lot of opinions. Today is one of those days where listening carefully to other points of view, including from friends and colleagues, is leading me to rethink my own views.”